Mashed Articles

[Here are two excellent articles on Software Defined Networks (SDN)
and WiFi 2.0.
As the article on SDN points out, the big advantage of
SDN, whether it is OpenFlow, UCLP or similar technology is that it
empowers customers to create their own network solution. Empowering
users enables innovation and creates new business opportunities.
Empowering carriers, on the other hand, stifles innovation and results
in attempts to extract revenue through monopoly rent e.g UBB. This is
why these two technologies are so important for R&E networks –
because their primary mission should be empowering researchers and
educators to enable new modalities and innovation in delivery of their
primary mission of research and education. R&E networks that act
and look like carriers, are not fulfilling their primary mission, and to
my mind are ultimately doomed.

SDN is so important these days,
because unfortunately most large Internet equipment manufacturers, over
the past few years, have been captured by the large carrier mindset and
are seeing far less innovation in this marketplace. Carrier mindset
capture is not a good thing – we have seen the tragic consequences in
Canada. Most of Canada’s high tech companies like Nortel, RIM,
Alcatel-Lucent (Newbridge), etc are struggling or have gone under
because they pursued this market. While the carrier market is extremely
lucrative, once inside the door, it puts blinders on the companies
serving that market. Nortel is a classic example. Despite being a
multi-billion dollar company it really only had 5 major customers – all
incumbent telcos. The whole organization revolved around satisfying the
needs of these 5 large customers. Despite many failed attempts to make a
right hand turn towards the Internet, the demands of these 5 customers
distorted all other values in the company. A classic example of this
perversion of values is Nortel’s infamous “Web tone” strategy. That one
simple phrase, to my mind, says it all in what is wrong with serving the
carrier market. And despite over 20 years of Internet growth, things
have hardly changed.

RIM now is going down the same path as
Nortel. It too has based its entire business strategy of marketing
through the carriers. Only belatedly it is now attempting to follow
Apple and market directly to end users. But after a decade of working
closely with telcos it is hard to imagine they will be able to change
their corporate culture sufficiently enough and fast enough in order to
survive.

This cozy relationship between equipment manufactures and
carriers in Canada, was largely driven by Canada’s restrictions on
foreign competition in the telecom marketplace. As a consequence of
Canadian legislation restricting foreign carriers, Canadian carriers
have remained the most profitable in virtually all of the OCED
countries. Telecom equipment manufacturers that wanted to grow and
survive in this market therefore had to cozy up to these wealthy
oligopolies. For a while this was a very successful strategy, when the
rest of the world was also dominated by monopoly carriers. But when the
rest of the world open up their markets to competition Canadian
manufacturers failed to adapt because Canadian carriers had to face very
little competition and to this day remain very profitable in comparison
to their international counterparts. It was not only equipment
manufacturers who suffered, but Canada’s academic research community as
well. Because the telcos, and their captive suppliers, were the only
ones who had the funds to support academic research, combined with a big
emphasis by Canadian funding council on industrial partnerships, most
academic research unsurprisingly focused on telecom issues. Canadian
academia largely missed the boat on academic Internet research, and to
this very day still remains a bit player in terms of Internet network
research issues.

This finally brings up the issue of Wifi 2.0. As
the article below states, Wifi 2.0 and Next Gen Wifi is clearly focused
on the carrier market and the Hotspot operators are being largely
ignored in these developments. The R&E network community is
demonstrating there is an alternate architecture for this market that
empowers end users. The SURFnet WifI/LTE/Eduroam pilot is a good
example. Other NRENs such as NORDunet, AARnet and JANET are also doing
some interesting work in this space. R&E networks I think have the
opportunity to once again demonstrate, as they have done with the
development of the original Internet, the web, customer owned fiber, etc
that network strategies that empower users such as SDN and enterprise
centric WiFi are ultimately the ones that enable innovation and create
new market opportunities.
For those who will be attending Internet
2 Joint Tech’s in Baton Rouge, I will be elaborating more on this theme
in my keynote talk. – BSA]

Hotspot 2.0 and the Next Generation Hotspot
——————————————-

Hotspot
2.0 and the Next Generation Hotspot initiatives are possibly the most
exciting areas of wireless progress occurring in 2012. For starters,
these developments have a worldwide scope of influence. The technologies
that come to market as a result of these programs will directly affect a
large portion of the world’s population. If brought to market with
extensibility, they could revolutionize the hotspot ease-of-use and
security landscapes. These programs deserve the spotlight.
The Initiatives
Hotspot
2.0 and Next Generation Hotspot (NGH) are highly complementary
initiatives, but they are different in scope. Hotspot 2.0 is the Wi-Fi
Alliance’s certification program that will include a technical
specification defining the Hotspot 2.0 technology. Following the Wi-Fi
Alliance’s core purpose, Hotspot 2.0 will also be a device
certification, based on product interoperability testing, that allows
vendors to implement the protocols in a common way.
Hotspot 2.0 is designed for Wi-Fi clients and infrastructure devices to support seamless connectivity to Wi-Fi networks.
[…]
Unfortunately,
the Hotspot 2.0 program is still largely focused around telecom
carriers and mobile network operators instead of public hotspot
operators, which is where we need change. Hotspot 2.0 should pave the
way for this change over time, but it is less of a focus in the
short-term future.

How does Openflow and SDN help Virtualization/Cloud
—————————————————————–
http://sunaytripathi.wordpress.com/2011/12/21/how-does-openflow-and-sdn-help-virtualizationcloud/
Introduction to Software Defined Networking and OpenFlow
Often
time I hear the term Openflow and Software Defined Networking
Networking used in many different context which range from solving
something simple and useful to literally solving the world hunger
problem (or fixing the world economy for that matter).
[…]
Openflow
creates a standard around how the management interface or Controller
talks to the equipment so the equipment vendors can design their
equipment without worrying about the management piece and someone else
can create a management piece knowing well that it will manage any
equipment that support Openflow. So people who understand standards ask
whats the big deal? I still can’t do more than what the equipment is
designed to do!! And that is the holy grail around any standard. By
creating the standard, you are separating the guys who make equipment to
focus on their expertise and guys doing management to make the
controllers better. This is in no way different than how computers work
today. Intel/AMD creates the key chips, vendors like Dell, HP etc.
create the servers and Linux community (or BSD, OpenSolaris, etc)
creates the OS and it all works together offering a better solution. It
achieves one more thing – it drives the H/W cost lower and creates more
competition while allowing a end user to pick the best H/W (from their
point of view) and the best controller based on features, reliability,
etc. There is no monopoly, plenty of choices and its all great for end
user.

Specially in the networking space where innovation was
lacking for a while and few companies were used to huge margins because
users had no choice. One trend that is driving the fire behind SDN is
virtualization. Both Server and storage side (H/W and OS) have made good
progress on this front but Network is far behind. By opening up the
space, SDN is allowing people like me (who are OS and Distributed
Systems people) to step into this world and drive the same innovation on
network side. So Openflow/SDN are great standards for the end user and
people who understand it see the power behind it.

——
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.
email: Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter: BillStArnaud
blog: http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype: Pocketpro

[From will they ever learn department,  we are once again seeing attempts by incumbent carriers to skirt rules around network neutrality.
They tried and failed with UBB. Now they are at it again with “speed boost” technologies.  The two technologies at question are Verizon’s “Turbo” service  and Roger’s “SpeedBoost”.  There are very few technical details, but it appears in the former case that users will be able to purchase additional instantaneous bandwidth to the detriment of other users on the same shared service.  Whether this will make a difference to actual throughput is another matter because the slow video may be due to server problems and not network congestion. And if you are in elevator with very poor connectivity, you will unlikely get any faster download speed, no matter how many times you press the turbo button. But will Verizon give you a credit if you don’t get the advertised speed boost?  I doubt it. Similarly the Rogers’ service, while still free, seems to imply faster speeds if they detect you are streaming a video, particularly from their own on-line service.  Will users who are not streaming video, but using other real time applications get the same benefit such as VoIP or Telepresence?  I doubt it.

The carriers continue to have this brain dead idea that bandwidth is a scarce resource – which is only true to the extent that were the ones who created this artificial scarcity.  Building a business case around an artificial scarcity is as stupid as trying to make a premium market from air we breathe.  Customers aren’t interested in buying bandwidth or quality of service to enhance their user experience. Just as with electricity they want and expect that just about any appliance or application will simply work – with no need for special speed boosts and other gimmicks.  Imagine negotiating with the electric utility for a little extra power when you needed to turn on your stove or TV.

It is last mile packet loss which has the biggest impact on the customer’s user experience – NOT bandwidth or congestion. The Internet (TCP/IP) is designed so that packet loss is used as a signaling tool to reduce packet throughput. Regardless of where the packet loss occurs the Internet is designed to slow down any data stream, that is affected by a lost packet.  However the rate to which a data stream is slowed down is greatly dependent on distance.  This is why moving caching boxes as close as possible to the user affects end-to- end throughput, particularly if there is ongoing packet loss.

Although bandwidth and congestion can be a factors affecting packet loss, there are much more clever  ways of reducing the impact of packet loss, especially in wireless environments.  There are two much simpler solutions. The first is to locate caching/cloud servers as close as possible to the end users. Something that companies like Akamai and Google do already – at no charge to the carrier. Decreasing wireless distance from the wireless node is the other critical factor. This is why integrating WiFi with 3G/4G is so important.

A good example of a carrier that “gets it” is Free.FR in France. Free.FR is  redefining what the idea of a carrier in the 21st century is, thanks to these innovations I have been talking about and pioneered by R&E networks like SURFnet. Integrating a blend of Wi-Fi, 3G and its all-fiber backbone, Free will offer unlimited voice, texting and data over the mobile networks.  Free.fr deploys their own set-top box for automatically sharing a portion of one’s broadband connection via Wi-Fi with other Free.fr customers. Over five million set-top boxes means Free.fr has a free Wi-Fi cloud covering major cities such as Paris. Even when away from home, you can easily get broadband instead of resorting to an expensive 3G network.  Their set top box will also allow extreme local caching, to further enhance the user mobile experience.  This is the future of broadband. Not silly gimmicks like TurboBoost or SpeedBoost—BSA]

Roger’s SpeedBoost
http://www.rogers.com/web/content/speedboostonsb?setLanguage=en&cm_mmc=Redirects-_-Consumer_Internet_Eng-_-SpeedBoost_0211-_-speedboost

Verizon’s Turbo Boost
http://gigaom.com/mobile/forget-caps-heres-the-next-big-thing-in-wireless-pricing/?utm_source=social&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=gigaom

How France’s Free will reinvent mobile
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/09/how-frances-free-will-reinvent-mobile/#OECD #Freemobile

——
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email:     Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter:  BillStArnaud
blog:       http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype:    Pocketpro

[Here is an excellent article by my good friend Lev Gonick on future trends for IT in Higher Ed.
I have been blogging about many of these trends, especially about how R&E networks and broadband will play a critical role in these developments.  For those who will be attending Internet Joint Techs in Baton Rouge I will be expounding on a number of these themes in my keynote talk on how research issues are operational drivers of network research  --BSA]

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012

The Year Ahead in IT, 2012
January 6, 2012 – 3:00am
By
Lev Gonick
This series of annual Year Ahead articles on technology and education began on the eve of what we now know is one of the profound downturns in modern capitalism. When history is written, the impact of the deep economic recession of 2008-2012 will have been pivotal in the shifting balance of economic and political power around the world. Clear, too, is the reality that innovation and technology as it is applied to education is moving rapidly from its Anglo-American-centered roots to a now globally distributed dynamic generating disruptive activities that affect learners and institutions the world over.
Seventy years ago, the Austrian-born Harvard lecturer and conservative political economist Joseph Schumpeter popularized the now famous description of the logic of capitalism, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.
The opening of new markets, foreign or domestic … illustrate(s) the same process of industrial mutation – if I may use that biological term – that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism.
Our colleges and universities, especially those in the United States, are among the most conservative institutions in the world. The rollback of public investment in, pressure for access to, and indeterminate impact of globalization on postsecondary education all contribute to significant disorientation in our thinking about the future of the university. And then there are the disruptive impacts of information technology that only exacerbate the general set of contradictions that we associate with higher education.
The faculty are autonomous and constrained, powerful and vulnerable, innovative at the margins yet conservative at the core, dedicated to education while demeaning teaching devoted to liberal arts and yet powerfully vocational, nonprofit in their sensibilities and at the same time opportunistically commercial, in what Clark Kerr, inThe Uses of the University, called an “aristocracy of intellect” in a populist society. And while reports of the death of the American university are greatly exaggerated, there is an ineluctable force at play that continues to exert growing pressure against the membranes of the higher education ecosystem. The uneven and unequal dynamics of the global economy and information technology are major forces leading to growing pressure for universities to adapt through the process of creative destruction. The emergent trends I note below include disruptive forces that, if history is a guide, will lead future students of the history of technology to note the period ahead as the beginning of the next great tech bubble.
The year ahead may be among the most difficult ever for the economics of postsecondary education in much of the world.  At the same time, and in the same time frame, I believe we will see major new developments from the world of information technology that will, over time, lead the university to adapt and enable the familiar institution to not only persist but to maintain its relevance to the disruptive forces of society and economy all around it
Here are the 2012 top 10 IT trends impacting the future of higher education:

1.  Open Learning Initiatives Become an Institutional Imperative
Each year for the past three I have noted in this annual column the rise of open learning and open education resources enabled through information and communication technology. This past year’s experimentation by Stanford’s much-publicized global offering to tens of thousands of learners around the world followed by MIT’s MITxinitiative will quickly become a table stakes conversation for most top universities and colleges the world over. The range of subjects, the variety of modalities for delivery, and the extension of learning opportunities around the world are approaching an inflection point.  No one can or should ignore the most important and explosive opportunity in postsecondary learning in over half a century.  As new massive open online learning environments (MOOLEs) move from a nascent state along the maturity curve economic models, new entrants and laggards, winners and losers, and new centers of knowledge will follow.

2. The United States Launches Next Generation Network Infrastructure and Applications in Partnership with Neighbors and Cities
Boundary-spanning activities are not limited to online learning environments. In 2012, at least two major national next generation network initiatives will be launched.  The goal is to create a comparative advantage for the United States in the network-enabled 21st-century economy.  The tactical approach is to partner with those prepared to invest, build and operate new gigabit networks in neighborhoods around our universities and colleges as well as offer “above the network” services to our neighbors. The premise is that advanced network infrastructure to the environs around the university will catalyze new, never-before-seen applications and services that will improve the quality of life of millions of Americans who live around our major universities.
Gig.U is a national initiative led by U.S. National Broadband Plan architect Blair Levin, designed to create a national partnership among universities, telecommunication providers, and technology companies that leverages blazing-speed wired and wireless networks to build a network of testbed facilities in neighborhoods around our universities.  The project draws inspiration from Google’s Gigabit Community initiative that led to the decision to engage with Kansas City and early prototyping some years earlier in Cleveland in the development of OneCommunity and the Case Connection Zone to build gigabit fiber to the home networks and applications.
The second initiative is US Ignite, a multifaceted initiative led by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, the National Science Foundation, and a new 501(c)3. US Ignite seeks to catalyze and choreograph the development of a new generation of applications that can run on and leverage the next generation networks being deployed by NSF, Google, Internet2, NLR,  Gig.U and others.
The opportunity to extend unprecedented network access and services to neighborhoods around our universities will unleash new opportunities for innovation, collaboration, and opportunities for both our postsecondary institutions and the cities and towns within which we live, work and study.

3. Big Data is Here: Getting Beyond the Campus View
Zettabyte-scale data sets (1 billion terabytes) will be here in 2012, if we can achieve three preconditions. Prospects of an emergent zettabyte-scale big science world of proteomic data are being rate limited by existing network capacity, visualization tools for analysis and the encrusted logic of university funding and our IT organizations.  Network and storage innovation and visualization and analytical tools will continue to evolve at cloud scale and speed.   The prospects of creating a vector in which the technology and our analytical tools meet the needs of our research science community will require some unprecedented collaboration among US funding agencies and our universities. The most exciting development on this front is the set of initiatives led by Internet2 and their NET+ work. Led by former MIT CIO Jerry Grochow, NET+ is our single best opportunity to support big science and to position the United States to be able to compete in the growing competitive international big science playing field.

NET+ is tackling the thorny problem associated with Schumpeter’s Creative Destruction proposition. We can spend the next 25 years in “business as usual mode” attempting to build the infrastructure for big science on each of our university campuses and reinforce the patterns of securing funding, building platforms, and supporting analytical services. We will also miss the train. There is simply no way we can afford to create redundant infrastructure to support the next generation of science, discovery, and innovation. Three-letter federal funding agencies, state economic development and education organizations, research and education networks, research scientists, and of course our higher education leaders, including our CIO community, should join and challenge Net+ to quickly set its sights on the development of an unprecedented collaborative set of platform technologies. The race for big science is on. The stakes are too high to be left to single or even small numbers of campus solutions.

4. Big Data Applied to Creating a New Learning Genome
The promise of massively scalable capacity to enable, track, and assess learning outcomes based on personalized learning needs is both compelling and ready for prime time. Notwithstanding internal debates on learning styles (Pasher, Harold, et al. “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 9.3 (2009): 105-119), the methods, modeling techniques, and rigor applied to big data science are well positioned to advance our understanding and application of learning sciences. The higher education marketplace is poised to begin marshaling the growing tsunami of data points and apply first generation algorithms to provide both predictive models of learning success and, over time, refine those algorithms to align different learning styles to learning successes.
The framework of a new learning genome begins in earnest in 2012. Look for a wide range of players from Blackboard Analytics, University of Phoenix, Kaplan University, Pearson Education, and perhaps ERP players to make a run at an “Enterprise Education Platform.” Startups with secret sauce are ready to scatter their pixie dust on colleges and universities to magically solve everything that ails us, from predictive modeling for retention to career counseling.
Growing interest in big data for college success has many CIOs salivating at the opportunity to build new platforms and realign their organizations to respond to the heightened interest in data-driven decision support.  But the science of learning as applied to a new learning genome is in a nascent state. We should be wary of the unbounded enthusiasm that the hype curve will generate in the next year and work on the foundations of campus readiness, governance and partnerships to focus on requirements and advancing our ability to contribute our loaf of bread to the emergent marketplace of “solutions.”

5. SmartPads and New Learning Content
Circa 1993, the most provocative concepts in educational technology were CD-ROM and laserdisc multimedia tools, like Macromedia Director and Bob Stein’s Voyager multimedia publishing ventures that produced works like Who Built America. Then came the World Wide Web.  Multimedia education content innovation remained largely frozen in place for nearly 20 years. The emergence of SmartPad technologies has led to a resurgence and revival of interest in multimedia content education. To date we have seen well-financed platform players transpose traditional textbooks and port them over to Kindle, iOS and/or Android environments.
The SmartPad is the experience platform of choice for many students.  Value-added functionality for textbooks like highlighting, clipping services, and collaboration tools will continue to extend the value of existing textbook content and the role of the traditional publishing industry. In 2012 a new class of learning content projects that combines advanced multimedia tools and hybrid interactions enabled over the Web will find their way to the mainstream. Look for gaming platforms on SmartPads (with integration on the web) to create quest adventures for disciplines as diverse as history and physical sciences.  Traditional research journals in disciplines such as law and medicine will start piloting the integration of multimedia content, well beyond nesting video or hyperlinked content.  Areas as diverse as nursing and workforce development will integrate artificial intelligence engines and advanced multimedia learning content to promote simulation experiences to facilitate meaningful use and practice. This emergent market will likely see several large venture back startups this year along with interest from a handful of forward-thinking traditional publishers.

[smip]

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/06/gonick-essay-predicting-higher-ed-it-developments-2012#ixzz1igRdxyH4
Inside Higher Ed

——
R&E Network and Green Internet Consultant.

email:     Bill.St.Arnaud@gmail.com
twitter:  BillStArnaud
blog:       http://billstarnaud.blogspot.com/
skype:    Pocketpro